John Ormond Holliday
Last updated 13:39, Thursday, 27 March 2008
His record of public service was exceptional and yet John Ormond Holliday was an essentially modest man who rarely mentioned his achievements.
He was a member of Cumberland County Council and a magistrate – a long-serving member of the Wigton Bench, from 1961 to 1994.
He had served on the committee of the Silloth Convalescent Home and the Sea Dyke and Longcake charitable organisations.
He had been a local school governor and worked on behalf of the Carlisle Cathedral restoration fund.
Then there were his years of service, on the Cumberland County Council and the succeeding Cumbria County Council, of which he was chairman for a while. He served on various council committees and was also a member of the Solway River Purification Board.
On the recreational side, he was a long-time member of and former player at Silloth Rugby Union Football Club.
And despite all this he somehow found the time to be a successful farmer.
Always known as Ormond or, sometimes, Ormie, he was 83 when he died, leaving his wife, two sons and two grandchildren. One of his sons farms near Port Elizabeth, in South Africa and the other is a long-haul pilot with the Virgin airline.
Ormond Holliday had a shaky start to life. He was born at Greenrow Farm, Silloth, and suffered from something called a TB hip, which meant that, as a boy, he had a lie on his back for a long time and could not go to school until he was eight. Then he went to the Harecroft Hall preparatory school, at Seascale and later to the public school at Giggleswick, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He could have gone to the prestigious Sedbergh School but as this establishment had a rigorous sports routine his parents thought the smaller school more appropriate. When he was 18 he returned home to work on the farm in Silloth, the town and the area that he loved and by now his physical condition had improved so much that he was able to play rugby.
He had two close encounters with explosive devices. The first was during the World War Two years when a bomb or an aerial mine fell onto the farmhouse and everyone had to move out for a while because the building was badly damaged.
His second brush with munitions came after the war when the ship on which he was returning from Denmark hit a left-over mine floating around in the North Sea. The vessel sank and he was one of the last people to be rescued.
The Scandinavian trip came after he won a Nuffield Scholarship, which took him to both Denmark and Sweden and, later, to the USA to study farming, mainly in New York State. Then he came home again to farm at Greenrow and Causewayhead and to begin his many years of public service.
Mr Holliday’s funeral took place at Christ Church, Silloth, and was followed by cremation in Carlisle.
W Scott and Sons, Silloth, made the arrangements.
